Title:  Assured Information Distillation in Social Sensing.

Abstract: The proliferation of digital sensors and the advent of
online social broadcast media (e.g., Twitter and Flickr) create a
deluge of unfiltered, unstructured, and unvetted data about the
physical environment. This opens up unprecedented challenges
and opportunities in social sensing, where the goal is to distill reliable information from
social sources and devices in their possession. This talk will present a new analytical
framework and theories to obtain reliable information with quality guarantees from large
amounts of unreliable social sensing data. Noticeably, our analytical framework is the first
to jointly model the complex interactions among three deeply coupled networks
underlying the data; namely, the information, social and physical networks. The talk will
also introduce a new information distillation system we built, called Apollo, which has
been applied in a wide range of social sensing applications. Examples include
event/disaster tracking, smart road applications, environment monitoring, and anomaly
detection. The talk will conclude with a few directions for future research
.